About

Hi! I’m Nathan and I live in Swindon, a very average town, in the UK, with my wife, June.

I work as an Azure platform engineer these days, working with Terraform, AZ CLI, and Azure DevOps. It’s quite fun really. I battle against what I call PIAC (pseudo-infrastructure-as-code) and try to preach best practices in Terraform like repeatable, reliable naming conventions, not making assumptions in your modules, and keeping it as DRY as you can.

In my 20 year career I’ve done a number of roles and have picked up a varied skillset along the way. Recently I worked to improve performance and stability, as well as solve long-standing problems, in a multi-tiered Windows server estate. My toolkit consisted of Perfmon, WireShark, and various SysInternals tools (vmmap, procmon etc). I’m a big believer that sysadmins should know how to break down a network trace because so much protocol-level magic can be seen in those packets and it’s often the best place to find the source of truth.

Outside of work, I love dev work and am the sole developer of a fully automated NFL predictions game. The site is written in Django and VueJS and makes use of things like Celery and Redis, while calling on an ESPN API for data. Right now I’m (very slowly) learning Go, which is partly why I chose Hugo as the framework for this blog.

When I’m not sat at a computer I like to keep fit down my local gym and can sometimes be seen monkeying around at my local Ninja Warrior training gym.